


The Hole

by TricksterShi



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Deathfic, Disturbing Themes, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Sad, ambiguous - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 05:41:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9109033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TricksterShi/pseuds/TricksterShi
Summary: It’s not suicide, not really.  He doesn’t plan to die, he just gets tired.





	

It’s not suicide, not really.He doesn’t plan to die, he just gets tired. 

Not enough sleep, too much whiskey.There’s always a radio or a TV tuned in to white noise, an attempt to fill in the person shaped hole that turns silence into a pointed weapon.He drives too fast because the blur of pavement and fence posts is comforting.Like he’s drifting, like he’s a ghost passing through.And the windows are down because the wind fills his head and drowns out the empty seat beside him; it covers the echoes of cassette tapes gathering dust beneath the bench and the many unsaid words scattered in the creases of the leather.

It’s not suicide.He just gets slow.There’s no one to watch his blind spots and his bones are heavier these days.They carry too much, more than the weight of his body, more than the weight of his soul.Like they’re making up for the weight of the missing space, for the voice, the meat, the bones, the energy that should be there.It clings to his frame, a thousand memories growing heavier and more intangible with every passing tick of the clock.

So he drifts.He drives too fast.Drinks more than he eats.He stops seeing people and cars and towns.Instead, his mind pulls a curtain over everything.Sheer cotton, the kind you can peer through but it still softens the details, the edges.It makes reading hard, makes writing impossible.His eyes slide over the world, searching, searching, but there’s nothing to catch on.The hole swallowed the sharp crack of laughter, the shock of green, the long and tall and expanse of a beating heart beneath a flannel cover.There’s nothing else quite so defined as that in the whole world and his mind knows that.

It comes to him, a memory.He can’t place the date or face, because of the sheer cotton, but someone once talked to him about grief and living after.He remembers they told him it was possible.The hurt never goes away, it’s just like a healing wound.It’s nasty and tender to live with, eating at the corners of your nerves and your mind so you never forget it’s there.But it scabs over.Scars over.Heals.One day he’ll realize that it’s not chewing on his nerves or the edges of his mind.

That’s bullshit, though.Surface injuries, sure, that applies.But his bones ache along the fault lines of bad breaks that happened as a child.Twisted muscles jar ligaments and bones out of alignment and never settle back into their rightful places for long.Scar tissue, the deep kind, knots up and pushes things around, makes skin and muscle stiff, makes him compensate for it in ways that put new aches and strains on different places.

Grief never leaves.You just learn to move around it.He’s been doing that for so long, through so much.And there’s a whisper in the back of his head that asks _when is it too much?_

He doesn’t have an answer, just drifts by the question and presses a little harder on the gas.

And then, it happens.

Snow.Naked trees laid out like bare secrets.  A rabbit scurries away, kicks up white powder in the otherwise serene calm.He pauses, gun cold in his hands, takes a lungful of air that stabs and refreshes.Pain for pleasure, or perhaps necessity.The cotton veil is thinnest here, because it’s him and the land and the air, and the hole isn’t as deep, because what filled it might just step around the bend at any moment.

He hears it, but he can’t see the fangs until they’re on his neck.Then there’s blood on his jacket, down his front.A flash of pain like the high twang of plucked violin string.

His body hits the earth.Collapses.Rolls.He ends up on his back, eyes staring up past the tree branches, searching for sky, for eye watering blue among the falling white.It’s quick, no time for regrets or thoughts of any kind.His mind stutters down like the end of a film reel.Maybe his eyes close.Maybe they don’t.They’ve seen so much worse than his final death.

So it’s not suicide, except that it technically is, but technicalities only matter in court cases and grudges.He stopped counting the latter the moment a person shaped hole appeared by his side, stopped caring about them when the hole stayed.But he dies, and the shape of his own hole opens unnoticed.It joins with the first and creates a comfortable emptiness that stretches out in the middle of nowhere.Like a story fading before anyone is able to hear the ending.

And life goes on around them.

**Author's Note:**

> The news about Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds had me seeking comfort in SPN, which in itself is not the most comforting material, except when it is. All the feels had to go somewhere, and so here they are.


End file.
